Brunch With The Populists

WASHINGTON — The Willard Hotel here is my second-favorite hotel in America. (The Peabody in Memphis has retired the trophy, folks. Thank you all for playing.) Part of the reason for that is its location — just down the street from the White House — and part of it is because it once was a shattered hulk and its restoration has been glorious. But the real reason is that, back a century and some change ago, President Ulysses S Grant used to sit in the Willard's lobby, smoking his cigars and sipping a little brandy. This presented a golden opportunity for opportunists with gold to press their case for what would come to be called their special interests. In the history of American influence peddling, the short walk between the front doors of the hotel and the saloon was the Silk Road. Therefore, the lobby of the Willard is the place where, for historical lexicographical purposes, the Willard's is the ur-lobby for all the lobbyists that came afterwards.

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In Washington, on a weekend like this one, money doesn't seem like power any more than moonlight does. The presence of money is all around. It is in the politics that brought everyone here, and it is in the politics that keep everyone here, and it is in the politics that are practiced by everyone here, and it is in the politics that will be celebrated on Monday. It is what the lavish parties are all about. It is the song that people dance to at all the fancy balls. And, on Tuesday, when everybody staggers toward the airport, it will be there in the government those politics produce. Money doesn't seem like power, just omnipresent influence, the way the moon looks weak and pale above the sea while it's always still driving the tides.

In Washington, money is a great maze that, at the moment at least, since a series of Supreme Court decisions essentially has privatized political corruption, nobody can escape. The reformers have to get elected, and then, once elected, they have to raise enough money to spend to get themselves re-elected. The populists determined to work within the system to break the influence of money have to raise money to stay within the system to do their work. And breaking the influence of money is the key to doing almost everything else, including reordering the national economy so that wages are no longer stagnating and income no longer so baroquely unequal. Breaking the influence of money in our politics — and within the government those politics produce — is what a populist must do in the 21st Century. But first, of course, the populist has to get elected. And re-elected.

On Sunday, just up the hall from the lobby in which lobbying was invented, Senator Al Franken of Minnesota held a fundraising brunch to help kick off his 2014 re-election campaign. The sponsoring organization was Franken's Midwest Values PAC. The contributions were grouped automotively, since it is time to "gear up" for the coming campaign. An Overdrive contributor pledges to donate or raise $25,000, Fourth Gear pledges $10,000, all the way down to First Gear, which will cost you a mere $1000. This is the secret, coded lingua franca of all our electoral politics — left and right, Democratic or Republican, populist or reactionary. This is the unspoken truth of what you have to do in order to do what you believe is good. All politics is now summed up one way or another in Bassanio's plea to the court: Do a great right by doing a little wrong.

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It is not hypocrisy. That's too easy a template, and the allegedly self-governing republic that allowed this situation to develop, and that continues to allow it to exist, doesn't get off so easily that it can glibly call names. You cannot be elected to high political office in the United States without raising millions of dollars and you can't get millions of dollars without going to the people who have millions of dollars to spare. With income inequality yawning before all of us, that means the people who have profited most from our politics remain perpetually ahead of the rest of us because of the influence their money has brought to bear. Online fundraising from millions of small donors is still trying to catch up, but the influence of money after the election is over, and the last songs are played at the balls, remains the influence of the people with the easiest access to a great deal of it. If that is hypocrisy, then we are all complicit in it. The difference is what happens when you get there; Al Franken raises gobs of money and tries to get veterans health-care. By comparison, Paul Ryan campaigns as the bluecollar kid from Janesville and never takes a vote that would inconvenience Wall Street. The best we can do given the system we've allowed to develop is to distinguish the venial sin of enforced apparent hypocrisy from the mortal sin of selling out the people who voted for you.

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Franken and Warren are unassailable economic populists, at least as that term is reckoned in our current political situation. Those are not the roles they were assigned in some national narrative. It is the stuff of which they both have made their political careers, Franken in trying to shove the Affordable Care Act to the left by insisting on the 80-20 spending ratio for the insurance companies as far as care-versus-overhead spending, and Warren in her relentless pursuit of the various weasels and vermin in the financial services industry. But, to keep doing what he's doing, Al Franken has to get re-elected, and he has to line up those Overdrive folks who find it easy to lay their hands on 25-large. (I'm not sure I know many people who can do that. How about you?) At the same time, he has to raise that money while trying to do something about the economic devastation wrought in the country at least in part by the influence of money in the politics where he makes his living.

"The middle-class squeeze is something that Elizabeth Warren identified as a key problem, because our country's does well, and our economy does well, when it grows from the middle out. We know this," Franken told the crowd at the Willard. "And I know there are a lot of donors here who have done very well in their lives who started out in the middle class, or who started out from everywhere. But we know that we want a country where everybody has a chance to get an education, to send their kids to college, to get meaningful work, to make a living wage, to put a roof over their heads and feed your family."

And to make even some of that happen, he has to raise the money to get re-elected, and there have to be more of these marbled banquet halls and more of the expensive suits jostling over the scrambled eggs, because that is the way that we have allowed our politics to evolve. On a long and conspicuously opulent weekend celebrating the re-election of a Democratic president over a man who did everything to personify plutocracy except come out on stage with a monocle, we are all in the lobby now, waiting for the president to finish his cigar. The least we can all do is appreciate the irony, as we're all washed there by the money, which pulls our politics the way that the pale moon pulls the sea.

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